"And has not your father told you I have been in England?"
"Yes, monsieur le chevalier."
"And that I there met with a very lucky chance?"
"No, monsieur, I did not know that."
"Yes, a very worthy friend of mine, a great nobleman, the viceroy of Scotland and Ireland, has endowed me with an inheritance."
"An inheritance?"
"And a good one, too."
"Then you are rich?"
"Bah!"
"Receive my sincere congratulation."
"Thank you! Look, that is my house."
"Place de Greve?"
"Yes; don't you like this quarter?"
"On the contrary, the look-out over the water is pleasant. Oh! what a pretty old house!"
"The sign Notre Dame; it is an old cabaret, which I have transformed into a private house in two days."
"But the cabaret is still open?"
"Pardieu!"
"And where do you lodge, then?"
"I? I lodge with Planchet."
"You said, just now, 'This is my house.'"
"I said so, because, in fact, it is my house. I have bought it."
"Ah!" said Raoul.
"At ten years' purchase, my dear Raoul; a superb affair; I bought the house for thirty thousand livres; it has a garden which opens to the Rue de la Mortillerie; the cabaret lets for a thousand livres, with the first story; the garret, or second floor, for five hundred livres."
"Indeed!"
"Yes, indeed."
"Five hundred livres for a garret? Why, it is not habitable."
"Therefore no one inhabits it; only, you see, this garret has two windows which look out upon the Place."
"Yes, monsieur."
"Well, then, every time anybody is broken on the wheel or hung, quartered, or burnt, these two windows let for twenty pistoles."
"Oh!" said Raoul, with horror.
"It is disgusting, is it not?" said D'Artagnan.
"Oh!" repeated Raoul.
"It is disgusting, but so it is. These Parisian cockneys are sometimes real anthropophagi. I cannot conceive how men, Christians, can make such speculation.
"That is true."
"As for myself," continued D'Artagnan, "if I inhabited that house, on days of execution I would shut it up to the very keyholes; but I do not inhabit it."
"And you let the garret for five hundred livres?"
"To the ferocious cabaretier, who sub-lets it. I said, then, fifteen hundred livres."